We all want to experience real love, but how do you know when what you are experiencing is real love?
Valentine’s Day is a great time to express love to your beloved. Yet many people are confused about what love really is.
Most people want to both express and experience “real love,” yet often they have no idea what this is. Take a moment to think about how you would define real love.
Defining love is like defining a particular color to a person who has never been able to see color — you have to feel it to know what it is. The reason why it’s hard to define real love is because you cannot experience it with your mind, and definitions are of the mind. Real love is of the heart and is a feeling that is the result of your intention to be loving.
This is very different than the intention to get love. The desire to get love comes from the ego-wounded part of ourselves, the part that believes we need to get love from others in order to feel filled and worthy. Real love is something we get rather than something we are and something we share. This is what creates the confusion regarding love.
This Valentine’s Day, are you focused on what you will get from your partner, or on what you want to give and to share?
Real love is what you are — what your soul is — a spark of the Divine within. Love is what God/Spirit is. When your deepest desire is to be loving to yourself and your partner, this desire opens your heart, and you become filled with the love that is as ubiquitous as the air you breathe. This is real love — the experience of Spirit that fills the emptiness within and lets you know that you are never alone.
Real Love in a Relationship
In a relationship, how do we know when we are experiencing real love?
Real love is what you experience when you and your partner, or you and others, come together with open hearts already filled with love, and the love from your hearts overflows as it is openly and joyously shared.
If you come to a relationship with a feeling of emptiness and unworthiness, you cannot experience real love. Real love is not the cake — it is the icing on the cake. The cake comes from your intention to love yourself and others. This intention invites the love that is God to fill you up, and the icing is the love you then share with another or others.
If you expect another’s love to be the cake and you try to control that in various ways, then you will not experience real love. This comes from a closed heart and inner emptiness, the result of abandoning yourself rather than loving yourself and filling yourself with love.
Real Love Does Not Need Anything from Another Person
Real love is like a waterfall flowing down inside from Spirit, filling the lake within and then flowing out in rivers and streams as it is shared with others. However, when the heart is closed — due to your intention to control rather than to learn about loving yourself and others — then the lake is empty and becomes like a bottomless sinkhole, desperately attempting to suck love, attention, and approval from others.
If you want to experience real love within a relationship, then you need to open — through your desire to be loving — to unconditional love coming through you. You need to invite God-which-is-Love into your heart and become filled with it.
The challenge here is that you cannot desire to get love and be loving at the same time. The intent to get love will always lead to a closed heart and controlling behavior, which shuts out love. The intent to be loving, and to learn what is loving to yourself and others in any given moment, is what opens the heart. When you choose the intent to be loving with yourself and others, you will experience real love.
This Valentine’s Day, and each day, I hope you choose to focus on being loving — to yourself, to your partner, and to others — and experience real love!
© Copyright 2026 Margaret Paul. All Rights Reserved.
Dr. Margaret Paul is a bestselling author of 15 published books, a relationship expert, and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® self-healing process. She has appeared on numerous radio and television shows, including Oprah, and has successfully worked with hundreds of thousands and taught classes and seminars around the world for over 56 years. Her most recent book is Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding. Learn more at her website: https://www.innerbonding.com. Margaret is a member of the Transformational Leadership Council. Heal your relationship with Dr. Margaret’s 30-Day online video relationship course: Wildly, Deeply, Joyously in Love.
